Monday, April 13, 2009

From Miami With Love

So I haven't been doing much hard-core feminizing since I'm on vacation and all, but I thought I'd share some fun things.Since my travel partners are all exchange students from Asia these are a few things they taught me.

According to my friend from Hong Kong, women there experience equality in the work force and may even experience higher pay and rates of employment. I couldn't believe it, but I want to. While I had trouble finding stats, here's a link to an article that may back up his claim. It looks like Singapore and mainland China have some pretty independent women, too. It makes me want to question the labeling of countries as 1st vs. 3rd world, apparently the US is a leader, just not for women, instead the countries lagging behind are leading in financial equity between the genders. What's with that?

It's popular in Korea for women to have their eyebrows tattooed in. My traveling mate has the tattoo, I thought it was make up before she explained about it.

In Japan it is rare for friendships to develop between people born in different years due to the way the language is structured. Because there is special structure for the language between people who are even a year apart, they cannot speak to people one year their senior as they would their friends.

I also got a chance to visit the history museum in downtown Miami. It was great, I learned that Haitians do not receive the same immigration rights as Cubans and the U.S. sends them back to Haiti if they are discovered. I got to see a Haitian boat and a Cuban raft that were used to travel to the U.S. It was really amazing.

This city is beautiful, especially the South Beach area.

Oh and one more foreign fact: the Korean word for "boogers" sounds just like the Japanese for "children."